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Monthly Archives: December 2007

Alright, it’s a quote. Who Said it? Where? When? Yes, it’s a movie quote. For ‘Where’ I am looking for the movie name. For bonus points tell me where in the movie?

And now it’s time for Modem Problems by Matthew McAndrews. First, an apology. I forgot to upload the new strip pages to the website yesterday. And I don’t have time to do it right now. I will update it when I get home. So this time if you are reading this before 7pm PT on Friday the 28th of December 2007, the link to the Dec 27’th strip is going to be broken.

Also, I am working on doing a face lift for the Modem Problems site. It will mostly look the same, but be fractionally better. Most of the updates will be behind the scenes, but allows for some new content to be coming soon! But in the meantime, the old ‘index’ method of viewing all the strips will be broken. It will be back, under ‘The Archive’, but not immediately.

Health and Well-Being: Nothing changed from last week. Except a lot more relaxation time.

MMOs:Eve Online: Still playing. All three of my characters have gotten quite skilled. My ‘main’ is now earning more ISK fighting things and selling the wreckage she collects after the battles than my miner does mining asteroids all day. I’ve started to enjoy the PvE aspects of the game now. And the PvP aspects have not slapped me down yet. I’ve been playing this a little more as the Winter Event on CoX gets in the way of things on that game. So, at the moment, the $ I am paying for this game is worth it to me.

City of Heroes/Villains: As mentioned above, the Winter Event that is going on has sort of stalled some of my interest in the City. All the things I mentioned in last week’s post are true. Nothing truly new with this Winter Event, and just going through the Baby New Year mission again and again and again is not of interest to me, really. Though I have been going through all my characters on all the servers and making sure they have this year’s Winter Event badge (just for connecting to the game). While I was at it, I have been playing through one mission with each of them, and getting their tray and panels set up for the way I currently like to play the game. But all in all, the Winter Event has taken more out of the game than it has added… for me. I look forward to when it is over and people will be ready to continue on missions like we were doing before the Winter Event.

Well, that’s really it. I have work today, so I need to get going. I want to get the work day dealt with so I can get back to working on the Modem Problems site. It’s a lot of repetitive work, as it involves rewriting 440 html pages. But when I am done, I will be able to update the site without having to upload so very many pages. The only side effect is that it’s going to break all the links in my journals to the images when I am done… and so all those journal entries will have to be edited to point to things correctly. But it’s all worth it! And will allow the site to grow in content and quality in the future, as it will make the old pages not need ANY changes every time I add a new strip… unlike the current design.

SOMEDAY I will go over to a database based version of the site, rather than this ‘manual’ method. But this way doesn’t require ANY cgi or php, and only a tiny amount of javascript… and THAT I could throw out and not use. Meaning this thing could live nearly anywhere. *grin*

The answers to last week’s Quote:
Quote: "He’s right on top of us. I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using."
Who Said it: Inigo Montoya (played by Mandy Patinkin
Where: In the movie The Princess Bride (In a Boat)
When: 1987 (In the Morning, with the Dread Pirate Roberts’ ship ‘right behind them’.)

Thanks for reading… time for me to get to work… last work day for me for the year! I’ll write again next week.

Health and Well-being:
I’m fine. Mhari’s Fine. We’re all fine… How are you?

MMOs:Eve Online: Things are going well over here. I took my Amarr character back out of Mimitar space to her own native area. So that should provide some slightly different content. The game is a refreshing break now and then from the other games. Just something different to do.

City of Heroes/Villains: The Winter Event has begun as of Monday. In general this is the first event in the City of franchise that I am not in the least excited about. It’s mostly the same old same old from last year. The addition of the candy canes to the presents to allow one to access the old badges from past years is really cool for people that missed things in prior years… but… well… that just opens up ‘old content’ with a new hook. And the new ski runs is a tiny thing. I don’t know. I am just disappointed is all. Of course, with Issue 11 having only just been released, and the big move of companies… guess there really wasn’t a lot of time available to do something truly unique for this year. But it’s just not doing anything for me as an ‘event’. Oh, well. *grin*

So, as far as the regularly scheduled things go, Thrilling Adventures had a good turn out on Monday. And we discovered that opening presents in a group of six really isn’t a good idea. Too easy to spawn Winter Lord. And when we tried to do Sister Psyche’s Task Force… well, the mobs were way too high level for our 21-23 group, at 26 and 27. So we quit out after getting defeated multiple times and will come back to it when we all have a few more levels under our belts.

Knight and the Angels went very well on Wednesday, and again we saw similar with opening presents as Thrilling Adventures did. But at level 36-37 it’s not quite so bad as it was at 21-23. And our missions all went fine.

In general I am feeling a little MMO’d out at the moment. And I have a lot of Further Confusion things to deal with. The con is only 5 weeks away!!! And I have a mailing to get out tonight/tomorrow morning. Lots of work to do.

Speaking of work, at least my non-day job stuff, I will be doing a major face lift on the Modem Problems website which will launch, hopefully, with the first strip of the new year. I really wanted to have the work done already, but health issues and other things got in the way. But the coming 2 4-day weekends are going to be real good for working on it. Especially with me slightly MMO’d out. *grin*

Last week’s Quote:
Quote: "Lord, I’ll do anything you ask tomorrow… just don’t call an alert tonight!"
Who Said It: Starbuck, played by Dirk Benedict
Where: Battlestar Galatica
When: 1978 – In the movie it was when Starbuck was about to go make out with his girlfriend in a fighter launch tube.

MMOs:Eve Online: *shrug* I love the new graphics. But I haven’t had time to play much this week.

Lord of the Rings Online: Didn’t touch it this week, though I looked at the icon once or twice and thought about it.

City of Heroes/Villains:: Commander Kitty is progressing through Field Crafter. Still got a lot to go, but I am past the half way point. Word from Mhari is that Mhari Lindhaven only needs the fourth crafter badge (1000 items created) to finish Field Crafter, and only 1 Badge more of the recipe creation badges (for L45/50 items) to have ALL the common recipes memorized. For a few minutes this week I thought Commander Kitty would beat Mhari Lindhaven to Field Crafter status. But now I know that she will beat me. 😉

We did Thrilling Adventures things on Monday and Thursday, went out working on Full Dark getting XP on Tuesday, and did Knight and the Angels on Wednesday. All in all a ‘normal’ week of play in the City.

On Monday they granted an award of +20K prestige per member to super/villain groups. And I worked on both the Primal Darkness and the Dark-Star bases with the extra value. It was only a general bit of work, not the full re-write I want to do. Both groups now have 5 enhancement tables and Dark-Star has two forges (one Tech and one Arcane) and two salvage bins. This is to support the field crafters as they need someplace to put all the mess of enhancements they are making. And the supergroups might as well benefit as the majority of the enhancements don’t sell worth beans. They are worth more to the other members of the supergroup.

All in all, things are going well. Work is HEAVY in the extreme, but that makes the days of work go by all the faster. There’s a game this weekend and the Further Confusion staff meeting. I need to determine who is going to sit where in the dealer room. Either tonight or at the meeting tomorrow. And I need to prepare the dealer mailing which needs to go in the mail by Wednesday for me to be happy. So, I have lots to do. 😉

Last Week’s QuoteQuote: "What’s the matter, are you paralyzed from the neck up, or are you hurt?"

Who: Jack Colton, played by Michael Douglas.
Where: In the movie, Romancing the Stone
When: The movie was released in 1984.

It’s that time again! The subject line for this entry is a quote. Who said it? Where? and When? I will give the answers in next week’s journal entry. If you know the answers to these questions, place them in a comment to this journal entry. I will score the answers. Please let me know if you had to use a search engine to find the answers. For bonus points, give more detail than just the bare answers. *grin*

I’m going to try to make this entry short, as I am entering this on a break while at work and I need to be quick, as I have a LOT of work I need to do. It’s a busy time. But my brain needed a break and I forgot to get this written before leaving for work.

Health and Wellbeing: Okay, so we started out this week with a few more days of Mhari getting an IV of antibiotics every 6 hours. But we finished that up on Sunday and she had the PICC line out on Monday morning. She saw her doctor on Tuesday and things seem to be going well. There are still going to be more things down the road for her, and our diet has had to change to be better for her, but we are sort of getting back to normal.

I am doing okay. Not top of my game, but okay. Getting better sleep now that I can get more than 5 hours at a time. And having Mhari looking and sounding better has allowed me to rest easier and not worry quite so much. I’ve returned to the office and am keeping my normal work schedule again and getting back into the swing of things.

MMOsEve Online: Well, the biggest thing here is that they released their big content and engine update on Eve, called Trinity. When you play the game on a machine with a pre-shader 3.0 graphics card, there’s not that much different, though the UI updates are very nice, and the game seems to flow a little better than it did. But run it on a newer video card, like my Nvidia 7950 and it is SWEET! Very attractive to the eye, many improvements, and it has the same flow improvements. The improved graphics does not appear to slow it down, at least not for me. Gameplay wise, I don’t have much to report yet. We’ll see.

As to my characters… they improve. I have character #1 trained almost to the point where I can move character #2 to account #1 and close account #2. Character #’s 2 and 3 are still a long ways from where I want to stop worrying about training. But then accounts #1 and #3 are going to be around side-by-side for at least another 5 months, no worries there.

Lord of the Rings Online: Nothing to report.

City of Heroes/Villains: The biggest thing was last Friday when we went to the Bay Area Meet and Greet at D&B in Milpitas. The place was packed with players of the games. And there was a LARGE turn out of the developers, including Manticore (Sean Fish) out from Austin, TX, as well as all the core developers from NCSoft NorCal (formerly a part of Cryptic). War Witch, Back Alley Brawler, Positron, SexyJ, folks from marketing and the producer, as well as ExLibris and LightHouse (Now I see another place where LightHouse gets his name… he’s Tall). War Witch had gotten myself and the others from our gaming group (which includes her Husband, Patriot) marked as VIP’s, so we got early access to the Devs, and got to sit in the cooler, initially less-crowded room. We chatted with other players, sat at the table marked Guardian to represent for our server, and had a very good turn out of the players from the Dark-Star and Primal Darkness supergroups.

There were a lot of things that went on at the Meet and Greet that have been covered a lot better elsewhere. Go over to the City of Heroes website and click on the news article about it if you want to see some of those reports.

Inside the actual game, the Thrilling Adventures team finished off the Synapse taskforce on Monday, beating down Babbage with the help of the other members of Thrilling Adventures that had not gotten in on the rest of the taskforce as well as a couple of other heroes that came to our broadcast call for ‘all heroes’. Thanks to one Rad controller, and a level 31 stone tanker, we finally beat him. Then we finished off the Taskforce and took down the Clockwork King himself. This taskforce is less tedious than the Positron taskforce (having only like 8-9 door missions rather than Positron’s 15) but still, as we took it at level 20, most of us spent time only earning INF rather than XP as we hit the 21 mark.

The Knights and the Angels outing on Wednesday was mostly spent in Dark Astoria, clearing out Nemesis or Council ‘problems’.

The Tuesday night Raging Darkness session was sort of hindered by a server glitch that Protector was suffering that caused lots of ‘invalid*’ messages to come through the error channel and caused the server to stop responding to global channels and the like. It was also plagued with some spammers using the tell system to repeatedly try to push us all into buying INF from them and pay for power leveling services. Many of us were tempted to program ‘/ignore_spammer’ into a bind so we wouldn’t have to type it all out we were using it so often.